Last Updated on Aug 12, 2013 by Jenna Scaglione
Are you preparing and optimizing your site for the upcoming holiday season?
For the past month we have been discussing how to adjust and prepare your marketing to enhance your sales potential once the holiday season hits. Today, we will focus on an integral strategy for improving visibility and driving traffic to your website.
If you are an Ecommerce marketer striving to thrive in this ever-changing online climate, you most definitely have heard of the term “SEO” or search engine optimization. SEO is essential to ranking in the search engines and maximizing your visibility online. More visibility = more website visitors = more sales and increased reputation which = more visitors and so on and so on.
If you haven’t read last week’s post, I recommend you do so. It discusses tips on becoming “Google compliant” just in time for the holidays.
In today’s post, I will continue with SEO and talk about how to increase your visibility with some simple fixes to your website and business. Some of these practices can likely shift your popularity in a short period of time, so don’t neglect them!
Google Trusted Stores
Whenever you hear “Google” and “Trusted” in the same phrase, you should take notice.
The Google Trusted Stores Program is a certification program that allows merchants to display security badges on their website. Acceptance into the program would instantly boost your online reputation and increase your trust factor, which attracts online shoppers and makes them feel comfortable buying from you. In addition, as a Google Trusted Store, your customers can receive free purchase protection from Google, an assurance that they can trust your store and will receive their money back should a discrepancy arise.
Your store must meet certain qualifications to display the Trusted Stores badge, mainly customer service and shipping. Once accepted, you must complete several integration steps to display the security badges and track sales. Should you need help with this step, Numinix offers support and a specific module that helps you to easily complete the integration process.
Google Product Search
Need more exposure? Upload your products into the Google Merchant Center and allow people to find them via Google Shopping and other Google products. Drive more traffic to your website as a result.
Search-engine Friendly URLs
Do your URLs look like this?
www.yourdomain.com/yourcategory/your-product.html
Or like this?
www.yourdomain.com/yourcategory/xyz-14?584-569?
You want the search engines AND your visitors to understand the content of your pages via your URLs, so in the above instance, the first example is cleaner and more SEO friendly. Converting your url to a search engine friendly format can increase your rankings and readability.
There are more potential SEO issues to consider when it comes to your website urls and their structure. See the Magic SEO URLs module for more information.
Additional Tips
In addition to the above three factors, you should also submit an XML sitemap and install Google Analytics on your site. Executing these is not always easy, but thankfully Numinix does the heavy lifting.
If you want to boost your SEO in time for the holiday season and take advantage of every strategy mentioned in this article, take a look at the Numinix SEO Booster Pack, a perfect accompaniment to your holiday marketing campaign and a necessity to improve visibility and rankings in time for the holidays.